As part of the joy and festivities surrounding the opening of the St. Louis Cardinals’ new stadium a few years ago, Bud Selig and MLB granted them the privilege of hosting the All-Star Game this season. Seems natural, seems fair. There’s one tiny problem, and that is that there’s absolutely nothing on the site of their old ballpark, Busch Memorial Stadium, right next door.

(This year’s award for excellence in architecture goes to…)

So while it’s probably not feasible to get developers to start and finish construction of an entertainment complex for the fans in six weeks, as JOE SPORTS FAN points out, there’s one thing they do know how to do, and that’s building a softball field on the hallowed old grounds. All across America, overweight men with overexpensive bats just got goose bumps, and they don’t even know why.

There’s nothing particularly cringe-worthy if ladies are playing on this field or anything; softball is their version of the sport and it’s fun and exciting for them. Plus the pitching is usually fast.

But men playing slow-pitch softball, right there on the piece of real estate where Ozzie Smith and the Cardinals held court for decades, might be the funniest thing we’ve ever heard of. We’d go into a lengthy description of what Softball Guy looks like, but let’s just keep it simple and say “if Matt Stairs and Kenny Powers somehow made babies.”

It’s fitting, really, that they’d be playing softball on Mark McGwire’s old turf, since McGwire juiced his way to unprecedented amounts of home runs and these guys are having the ball lobbed to them. They’re both perversions of the sport, strictly in the name of the long ball. Nothing to be proud of, really.

Softball. Ha. Hahahahaha. Haaaa.